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Schley,
Mathilde Georgine
(sometimes anglicized to Mathilda Georgina), b.
Painter, chiefly of landscapes, she grew up in Dodge County,
Wisconsin, in what was then largely a bilingual community. Thanks to the
efforts of her German-born mother, Mathilde Schley learned to read and write
German even before attending public schools in Mayville and Juneau, Wisconsin.
She later worked as a telegraph operator in Rolling Prairie, Wisconsin, and
from 1888 to 1891 was in Kansas, chiefly in Neodeska (Wilson County), where she
had relatives. She found employment
there as a drawing teacher and also began to exhibit her work.
After returning to Wisconsin she lived for a time at
her parents' farm near Oak Grove, but by 1893 had moved to Watertown, where she
opened a dressmaking business with her sister Lydia. The two sisters moved to
Milwaukee the following year and started a dressmaking business there. This
ultimately proved to be so successful that they were able to travel, spend
summers in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and even build a small apartment house, the
Schley Apartments, where they lived.
After settling in Milwaukee, Mathilde Schley received
instruction from Otto von Ernst and Richard Lorenz, probably at the Milwaukee
Art School. She also studied with Alexander Mueller, presumably at the school
which he ran in connection with the Milwaukee Art Students League. Her own
paintings, however, are little influenced by the German academic style and
reflect instead an impressionist technique and an openness toward brightly
illuminated outdoor scenes. The pointilistic quality of her paintings is partly
a result of her preference for the palette knife rather than a brush to apply
paint. Her paintings typically depict buildings in rural Wisconsin, but also
include a still life, a floral painting, and several portraits of relatives.
One of her best paintings, showing her sister Lydia
in a landscape setting, was painted from a snapshot taken in Germany during
their trip in the summer in 1926. But
Mathilde Schley's most unusual work is To
Valhalla, an allegorical scene showing a procession of robed figures. The
picture was probably inspired by "Procession of the Dead," a poem by
her sister Clara. Although in many
respects practical-minded, her temperament was not without an element of the
German Romantic tradition. She was a great admirer of nature and was entranced
at the sight of the full moon.
Only one of her paintings
is known to be in a public collection. Her painting of the historic Octagon House in Watertown, Wisconsin is
preserved at the Octagon House Museum. A number of her other paintings are
currently in the possession of family members.
Although Mathilde Schley sold few paintings, she was
something more than a talented amateur. She saw to it that her work was widely
exhibited and she was active in several professional associations, including
the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors.
Her paintings were often included in their annual shows at the Milwaukee
Art Institute and could also be seen in the Milwaukee Journal's Gallery of
Wisconsin Art and at galleries in Chicago, New York, and other cities. She belonged
to such out-of-town associations as the Salons of America and the New York
Independent Art Society, and her name was regularly listed in such professional
directories as the American Art Annual
and Who's Who in American Art. Dudley Crafts Watson, director of the
Milwaukee Art Institute from 1914 to 1924, recognized her talent and drew
attention to the highly individual character of her work.
Like many of the early settlers of Dodge County,
Mathilde Schley's family were "Old Lutherans," members of a religious
sect which left Germany as the result of a dispute with the state church of
Prussia. Mathilde Schley was much interested in the history of this migration,
which she thoroughly researched. In 1923 she published the first of what would
become dozens of articles written in German and dealing mainly with German
settlement in the U.S. These articles initially appeared in German-language
newspapers in Wisconsin but were often reprinted in other German-American
newspapers. A number of the articles were collected in two privately printed
books, Deutschametika, (1935) and Ftitz, Pat, Jules und Hank (1940), books
which are illustrated with reproductions of a number of her paintings. She
seems to have seen these books as a means by which her memory might be perpetuated
and she took great care to see that copies were placed in several libraries,
including the library at Harvard University. It is reported that as she lay
dying from pneumonia she repeated the phrase "meine Bucher, meine
Bucher" ('my books, my books').
Mathilde Schley made three summer trips to Europe.
The first trip, in 1889, appears to have been mainly spent in Paris, a fact
which she was later able to exploit to her advantage in advertising her
millinery shop. In 1926 she traveled to Europe with her sister Lydia, visiting
the ancestral home of their maternal grandparents in Silesia and the ancestral
home of their paternal grandparents in the village of Hermannsthal near
Stettin. In 1928 she traveled alone to Europe and visited an international press
exhibition in Cologne, where she was the only American woman invited to attend.
She traveled economically and because of a favorable exchange rate was able to
get the most for her money on these trips.
People who knew Mathilde Schley describe her as having
been high strung and capable of brief emotional outbursts. The overall impression one gets of her is
that of an introverted, highly individualistic personality. She had a circle of women friends who
gathered at her apartment for coffee.
Most were well-to-do and like herself were unmarried. One of her friends, Franziska Tauber, was a
music teacher and a daughter of the Milwaukee painter William Tauber. Mathilde
played the piano well and liked to attend operatic performances. She was interested in architecture and was an
inveterate sightseer, often taking walks around Milwaukee and admiring public
buildings, such as churches. Although
she received a conventional religious upbringing and was well read in both the
German and English Bible, she resisted the idea of becoming a church member.
Extensive research on the life and work of Mathilde
Schley has been undertaken by Eugene B. Meier, Jr., a descendant of one of the
artist's sisters. Some of his manuscript material as well as copies of the
artist's publications may be found in the collection of the Max Kade Institute
for German-American Studies in Madison Wisconsin.
Merrill, Peter C., German-American Artists in Early
Milwaukee: A Biographical Dictionary,
Friends of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, Inc., 1997, pgs
110-112.
